20VC: Carvana CEO on Buiding a $50B Company, Losing 99% and Coming Back | Ernest Garcia: Inside the Mind of the Most Misunderstood CEO in America

The pressure of scale. Pushes everyone up the pyramid. I think that if you want to make the biggest difference Get in the game. You don't want to be a reaction to other people's reduced view of what you are. Well, when you're public, it's just cold. It's ruthless. It it's uh it's just results.

No one's ever gonna clap for you. What's more important to you is is it important to succeed or is it important to have The best personal life that you can have. This is Twenty V C with me, Harry Stebbings. Now today we feature one of the most incredible stories from the public markets. Ernie Garcia is the co-founder and CEO of Carvana. Under his leadership, Carvana went from a back of the napkin idea to a fifty Billion dollar public company, the fastest growing online used car retailer in US history, and landed on the Fortune 500 in under 10 years. However, it was not all up and to the right. In 2022, the stock plummeted 99% to a market cap of just$400 million. Today, they're back with a market cap of thirty five billion dollars. That's a 100x in the public markets, and they're selling four hundred thousand cars annually with a logistics network that rivals Amazon. Before we dive in today, turning your

Back of a napkin idea into a billion dollar startup requires countless hours of collaboration and teamwork. It can be really difficult to build a team that's aligned on everything from values to workflow, but that's exactly what Coda was made to do. Coda is an all-in-one collaborative workspace that started as a napkin sketch. Now, just five years. Since launching in beta, Coda has helped 5,000 teams all over the world get on the same page. Now at 20 VC, we've used Coda to bring structure to our content planning and episode prep, and it's made a huge difference. Instead of bouncing between different tools, we can keep everything from guest research to scheduling and notes all in one piece. Place, which saves us so much time. With Cody, you get the flexibility of docs, the structure of spreadsheets, and the power of applications, all built for enterprise. And it's got the intelligence of AI, which makes it even more awesome. If you're a startup team looking to increase alignment and agility, coda can help you move from planning to execution in record time. To try it for yourself, go to coda.io slash two zero vc today and get six free months of the team plan for startups. That's coda.io. Slash 20 VC to get started for free and get six free months of the team plan. And while Coda keeps the engine running smoothly, Shopify puts the pedal to the metal when it's time to sell. I spent my time looking into successful businesses of today and tomorrow, and often there's a business that's behind the business helping drive success.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (67 minutes, 14,992 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 10 episodes for $5, and monthly plans are cheaper still.